British Poetry after 1945

ENG3173

- Philip Larkin: Letters and Biographies (Andrew Motion, James Booth)

- Everybody is writing in the wake of W. B. Yeats and Elliot. The all pervasive
influence inspires anxiety (Harold Bloom). W. H. Auden is also a trmendously
influential writer, in some ways his trajectory is very similar to Elliot, they change
aesthetic tac in the middle of their poetic lives.

- Elliot’s work resonates with deep symbolism, W. H. Auden considerers himself a

Marxist, is interested in Freud, then moves to America and becomes Christian in
his outlook

- April: time of regrowth, spring, the old idea of regrowth gets adapted into
Christianity, here the idea of rebirth is cruel

- The artistic climate is one were poetry is diminished and more modest, the
strident certainty of modernism/ romanticism is gone

- Adorno: German theorist. After Auschwitz all poetry is rubbish, you can’t believe
in the transcending element of poetry after what has happened

- 1950s context from which Larkin emerged. Modernism os a reaction against

Romanticism, in reality that difference only goes so deep, fundamentally
modernism operates on the same aesthetic mechanism that is artistic
transcendence

- Elliot writes about the sterile metropolis, but then will somehow work in an echo
of past literary greatness or some mythological context and suddenly this
existence is imbued with depth, that procedure is in a way poetic artistic
transcendence, a recrudescence of poetic diction, this is essentially a religious
model, the world understood on it’s own terms is unsatisfactory, poetry tries to
rise up from a world that is fundamentally disappointing, when the Church lost it’s
power after the Enlightenment, Romanticism can be understood in that light, a
way of rising up above the dying generations

- Humes - definition of Romanticism as spilt religion, we need mystery, an

incomplete grasp of the world if we are to access some sort of hidden truth -
nihilism, valuing the world as it is on its concreteness, in order for it to be liveable,
we take the mundane and everyday and imbue it with some special power, the
war was inevitably a chastening experience. He is arguing for a return to Neo-
Classicism, as it isn’t interested in the exorbitant

1
- Donald Davy - associated with the group of poets that Larkin was through to form
part of, there was a realisation of the similarities between modernist writers and
romantic writers, they became known as The Movement. anti-phoney, anti-wet,
skeptical, robust, ironic, they are prepared to be as comfortable as possible,
artistic innovation was taken to an extreme by Modernism, stretching the bounds
of possibility, man’s inhumanity to man, pulling back from an unthinking
imprecation, like going against the tide of the 20th Century.

- The same type of mechanism is used by Freud, who teaches us to to take

people’s actions at face value, taking the face level of things and having an
impulse to go along, thereby dismissing the face value of things. For Conquest
and Davy, they are focusing on the empirical, we have as a wounded animal,
repeatedly incapable of living in the world and accepting it as it seems to be in its
obviousness, we reach to something else to make sense of it, we invent other
ideas, this new aesthetic of the 1950s had some criticism.

- Tomlinson - “a self imposed loss of nerve, can poetry be renewed from the verbal
debauchery of the forties”

- It is crucial to know that he did not know Yeats well, Larkin sees the Romantic
Yeats, and gets intoxicated by him, the music of his verse is as pervasive as
garlic, enraptured by Yeatsian song.

- Hardy was writing poetry at the turn of the 20th Century, and had nothing to do
with mainstream changes in poetry, Modernism happened and Hardy and his
style of poetry was largely overlooked, but it showed Larkin another way, an
alternative to Yeats and Elliot, more melancholy and observant, crediting Hardy
with curing him of Yeats

- The author of the North Shop was a patient suffering from a Celtic fever, the
music of Yeats, what follows is the first stanza from that poem, he sees as proof
of overcoming the Yeatsian influence, Bloom plays on the etymology of influence
as influenza

- Xxxii - cancellation of the idea of transcendence, there’s no effort to transfigure

the featureless of morning and night, it’s not a resignation that carries
disappointment, why would we expect the morning to be otherwise? - self
imposed loss, thr doesn’t give it any hidden insignificance

- Prose (handout) - incisive, perceptive approach to art

• 2nd p. No belief in tradition, or a common myth kitty - a common pot of change

- Church Going: Constant wavering between conformity and subverting rituals, the
place was not worth stopping for. Larkin’s attitude - ironic and detached, casual
visit to the church, the same casual attitude inflects the verse itself

2
- Ironic detachment, interior of the church, decline of religion, he accepts the blank
indifferent gaze of the world, what will happen if disbelief ceases to exist, as that
too holds belief, one day it will just be a vestige

- A lot of effort in the persona he’s creating, he’s holding a mirror up to himself, he’s
unabashed by his ignorance, he carefully curates a persona

- Even the cynical can want to be serious, the excuse that allow Larkin to sneak in
a slightly more earnest way, so he needs the first two stanzas to lure you in, then
a level of seriousness is needed

- The role of religion in the community, how the church once satisfied impulses

- What compulsions is he talking about?

- He have animalistic urges, but an idealistic narrative through which we make

sense of this animal life , we persuade us that thr narrative has a prescriptive
authority that we can decide

- Death invokes a serious attitude, invokes a serious perspective

- Phillisinicm , a philistine

- Quintessentially Larkinian

- Lines on a young lady’s photograph album

• It shows the imperfections, photographs record that which is past

• He conjures a place which is no longer, lacerate simply by being over, through

the performance he introduces a philosophical performance

• Lives came and went, it’s poignant - photographs, poetry becomes an

opportunity to grieve

• A line about a gap, a relatively minor pint, you cannot always take Larkin at his
word

• Characteristic of Larkin - not being completely serious, quite raw final stanza

- Reasons for Attendance

• He is drawn to sex like anybody, but remain on the outside, suspicion, he

senses happiness, he calls the feel of girls wonderful, he asks himself why he’s
outside, this hesitating characteristic of Larkin answers with a question, but
then why be in there?

• Art

3
 • Death - a fairly clear opposition being set between the herd (sex obsessed and
forgetting death) and the individual, were he to form part of a community, he
were to become forgetful of death, for you stop to take a stance on life, which
requires a certain kind of bravery

• Lied - why might he lie to himself about the reason for him being outside

• Greek tragedy - helps you become attached to life, Dionysian - once that
individuality is destroyed you become part of a group, removes your sense of
being an individual, you are part of the collective, once you lose your sense of
individuality you lose your individuality - pure Dionysian

• Art becomes a fig leaf for social awkwardness, his inability to integrate with
people, he nobles it by making it a choice

- No Road

• A metaphorical pathway between himself and a former lover, they agreed to let
the path between them fall to disuse, but he knows that the connection remains
that that he could bring it back to life, to leave things just a little longer - time
would gain the upper hand, this is a pivotal moment, with action he can salvage
the connection, but of not the pivots will sway away

• Liberty - is it my right or does it set me free? What he wants is not to prevent

the complete loss of connection, willing it is his ailment, he wants to allow the
road to disappear, but it is a kind of sickness that mars him

- Wants

• Poignant - that sense of very close but not quite, with poignancy comes loss,
almost possession but not quite, an aching aesthetic pleasure to be found in
loss

- Poetry of Departures

• Written in 1954 in Belfast

• Italicised lines - doesn’t sound like Larkin, different context and register, like of
Hollywood movies, electrifying lines that signal action, as though the hairs on
the back of his neck stand on end, they announce a way of living which is not
habitual to him in any rate

• He imagines himself swaggering … making himself sound like Indiana jones, it

is a brilliant sort of safety cause, but he isn’t going to do it because he sees
through it, he sees it as being down to insight, he sees his situation as
something other than entrapment by society

4
 • Direct language - enabling force, ultimately he rejects it, not because of timidity
- he believes, but because he sees it as an artificial mood

- Toads

• Emerging tendency to produce a turning in on themselves, he packs a lot of

complexity into the final lines

• A proleptic echo of poetry of departures, enabling and forceful, about

assertiveness and rebellion he brings forth the possibility but chooses
ultimately to stay in his comfort zone, the motivating force is the possibility of
freedom and self-assertion, it is more his antagonism towards work, he’s angry
that he has to work, like lecturers he’d rather do what they do, he sees some
kind of justice in this situation

• Strange complicity in his own shortcomings, he undermines himself wittingly

and unwittingly

- Mr Bleaney

• 3 stanzas is a quotation, he hired a room in a house, making a list in a deadpan,

matter of fact way

• Announcing of the change of tone in the stanzas

• He’s taking Bleaney’s life, he can life without transcendence

• You can only do what your nature permits you to do, you get the life that you’re
capable of living, how we live measures our own nature, an external
manifestation of that truth

• Stoics and Epicureans: To limit one’s sense of care, all non-physical pain
derives from our sense of care and desire for things in the world, if we limit this
then we limit our vulnerability for pain

• Ataraxia - equanimity or state of calm for one to think more rationally about the
world

• The path to a kind of equanimity lies through being entirely disposed of illusion
and accepting the world in an un-transfigured way

• how we life measures our own nature

- Home is so Sad

• Poignancy - home is a joyous shot, archer imagery, the target is how things
ought to be, the ideal, the couple that are setting up home together, they
together take shot and how things ought to be, but the arrow falls far wide as it

5
 doesn’t his target, the things they bought represent the ideal, socially
aspirational in some sense

- Afternoons

• A sort of declension at work

• A generational, elegiac mourning that the generation is doing for itself,

generational sexual envy, the generation that very recently was free and
adventurous, has been tamed

• mundane, humdrum, ritual laden life for the next generation

• A sense of blossoming which is fading, an idea of poignancy, a brief and

glorious moment that is no more, Larkin records the passing of it

- Sunny Prestatyn

• Society made adjustments to the poster to make it reflect society, there’s a kind
of justice, they’ve seen it as a lie and have done animalistic things to it in a way
that makes it more accurate, degraded to the level of society by society

- The Whitsun Weddings - marks maturity, confidence in his writing, self-assurance

- He records a journey from Hull, enamoured by life in it’s most mundane forms - a
train journey, exhilaration in travel, a sense of possibility which he is able to tap in
to

• The expansiveness, self-assurance and confidence, a little snarky comments at

the cheap jewellery and clothes, he ascribes wisdom and understanding t the
women in the wedding parties

• Interesting rhyme scheme (first stanza captures the excitement and heat -
smells and colours)

• Wide angled lyricism

• Gradual sense of excitement, provincial caricatures, gentle and indulgent satire

• In many respects he is so contemptuous of society, here he devours it, willingly

enters a community, a social reach/ breadth

• A gentle pun, visual quality to the poem as the landscape goes past

• Odeon

• Gathering momentum of the poem like the train

• Final stanza - conveys a change of mood. Imagery of falling arrows, he’s alive
to the material aspect of all this, sort of a climax leading to fertility, the

6
 excitement, build up, explosion, and seeds being sown for the next generation,
the arrow being shot (metaphor)

- An Arundel Tomb

• Very different tone from churchgoing, where he sees the interior

dispassionately, here the dead are presented in an idealised way

• Relationship is conveyed in a small detail, prompting Larkin into speculation,

he’s wrestling with this, you sense resistance and doubt

• Only the fixed material attitude remains

• The final stanza - untruth, a lot for words beginning with ‘un’

• Tremendous rhetorical manoeuvre

• Proof - absence of uncertainty , almost instinct, almost true - a stepping back

from the proof , through that very deft rhetorical side stepping he still manages
to take the wind out of the sails of what would be a too triumphant conclusion,
Larkin through and through

- Here

• A train journey to Hull from London

• Larkin diminishment of that grand poetic gesture

• A process of un-deception, becoming less deceived

• Final stanza - remarkable, very austere beauty, acetic, divestment of society

and cheap contemporary consumerism, but there is a sense of equanimity and
clam, divestment of position, only by accepting life can you have unfenced
existence, coming down to reality leads to to the calm that is appreciative of
unfenced existence

• He records the world in its transience and poignancy, is this not a kind of
transcendence, very austere language

- Annus Mirabilis

• The year of miracles, coined by Dryden to refer to the year 1666

• The Great Fire of London

• The sexual revolution, modern contraceptives, liberal morality, sexuality is

associated with shame, he sees it as a turning point, but crucially feels that he
has missed out

• sexual jealousy

7
- Sad Steps

• Arresting first line, a deliberate opening of the poem, to arrest the reader’s
attention and to shock

• He seems caught between domesticity and obeying bodily functions in the

middle of the night, being caught off guard by something that potentially is
beautiful, slightly other worldly, almost abandoned by humanity

• This is the sublime, or an inkling of

• We might be visually incapable of taking in its enormity, but we can

comprehend that it is possible and understand it through measurements

• Element of separateness, in the 4th stanza he plays up to it a little bit, clearly

sardonic, having Larkinian fun, its silly and sardonic because it’s overblown and
extravagant, making fun of Romanticism, following it by a crushing ‘no’

• He takes it back down to the human scale, a celebration of the suburban

mental ratio

• Invigorated by thoughts of mortality, rather unnerved it’s still the Larkin who
seeks to be the less deceived

- High Windows

• He wonders if he passed through a similar convention and if he too had been

envied

• A tendency to Hermeticism

• Eruption in the poetry

• Can be compared to Water (pg. 91) jokey and irreverent, more comfortable with
ironic detachment

- Vers de Société

• Craps - crapulent - drunk

• The ageing Larkin

• Death goes from making him more strongly resolute to something he’s fearful of

• An alcoholic of epic proportions, drinking himself into oblivion, then waking up

alone, befuddled, half drunk and unable to sleep

- Aubade

• Mocks both religion, signs and philosophy

8
 • The not feeling is the most terrifying

• Final stanza articulates that we can accept but cannot articulate death

• Something claustrophobic of death on the periphery, panic

• The indifference of the world casts his fear into even sharper relief, there’s
something absurd about it, everyone goes through suffering, brutal in the sense
that the world goes on, the suburban mental ratio that is not something that is
without its drama in this insistent daily routine

Ted Hughes

- Preserved childhood experiences like Plath

- What draws him is this strange otherness of the rock, when he first ascends up to
the rock its like he’s looking through the other end of the telescope

- He becomes a believer in astrology, words

- In Cambridge the course was inhibiting his creativity, which came out through a
dream, a portentous dream that made him resign

- There is a darkness and a cruelty that attends to Hughes

- The Thought Fox

• His fascination with animality tends to cary with it a critique of human being in
some way

• The inability to write, Cambridge literary criticism under F.R. Leavis, the animal’s
response to that kind of anaemia

- The Hawk in the Rain

• The hawk represents the opposite of the belligerent entrapment

• The hawk is like the conductor of the violence, the diamond point of will, desire
manifested, without hesitation

• Double meaning whee the haw stands still, even after all this time the hawk
remains

• An opposition between the person who’s drowning in the farmland as though

nature is against him, one the one hand, and then on the other hand there is
this Hawn that seems to be in full possession of the entire situation, whose will
is the pole star

• Violence - a religion of blood and violence emerges from the poetry, which
Hughes seems to be awestruck by

9
- The Jaguar

• Vitality and power and holds everyone’s fascination

• Absence of reflection, no inner life, blind eyes as it follows he short fuses of its
eyes

• No capacity for deliberation and calculation, a space between impulse and

action, he is fascinated by the power that lac of self-consciousness can give
you, make yourself animal

- Exam: gobbets/ extracts, identify, say something specific about the extract, in
relation to the poem that they for part of, relate the poem to the rest of the work
of the writer. 3 extracts, two from the same poet, choose one gobbet only

- A natural world very particularly conceived by Hughes

- Wind

• Strange recurrent image f the wind denting eyeballs, general violence of nature

• Outer and inner tumult, they are resonating together

• Imagine it musically, Zimmerman soundtrack, whit noise that rises in pitch and
intensity and adds to the rising plangent clamour in this poem

• Potentiality resides in a heavy quality

- Hawk Roosting

• Brief calm before the storm, it is the animal that controls that calm

• The critique of what it is to be human

- Thrushes

• Mozart - flawless transmission between will and execution, with ordinary man it
is otherwise, something futile and impotent, an act that worships itself, a
weakening, the animal spirit atrophies

- Crow: descending into negativity, crow is destroyed and put back together, he
changes nearly very slightly, breaking down and reconstruction, then a final
triumphant emergence, autobiographical. Linking trickery of the crow to sexuality
very strongly

- View of a Pig (its deadness is so far removed that it seems to puncture the poem,
an otherness, )

The otherness of animals

10
Keats allows uncertainty to exist and contrasts it with Wordsworth’s egotistical
sublime

Plath: strongly associated with confessional verse, spilling her innermost secrets of
her subjectivity

- Crow’s First Lesson

- Notes for a Little Play

- A Childish Prank

- Hughes was a farmer during the day: Constant contact with the natural world was
fuel for his imagination

- Ravens

- February 17th

- March Morning Unlike Others

- 1998: public perception of Hughes varied, he was the poet who in some way
killed Plath, and he remained silent, when he realised he was close to death he
published birthday letters, poems written over many decades, it was front page
news

- Fullbright Scholars: Conveys the impossible freshness of novelties and fresh

starts

- Pg 1015: St Botolph’s

- Fidelity pg. 1060 - his abstinence that would ensure good fortune in his
relationship with Plath

- Palth suffered from an electra complex, she then seeks a man to live up to that
impossible standard, that untouchable impossibility, someone equal to her ideal
of manhood

- The Shot: what fired and aimed the bullet is the death of her father. Extraordinarily
sad poem, tender memories and details that he retains are incredibly touching,
self-deprecating as he wasn’t good enough, he only managed to catch small
mementos, strong pathos, presents him as the victim when he’s been vilified for
decades

Seamus Heaney

- Cow in Calf

- Turkeys Observed

11
- Pg 3. Digging, reminds us of the Thought Fox

- pg. 5

- Pg 22 requiem for the croppies: he was writing at the time of the troubles.
Describing griller warfare, and the shaking of farm tools at the warfare. Classic
regeneration motif, he might be able to link political commentary with these
archetypal myths of sacrifice and regeneration

- Bogland

- Book: The Bog People - sets his imagination on fire, it details bodies that have
been recovered from bogs across Scandinavia, yet they look incredibly fresh

- Pg 64. The tollund man. Recognition of familiarity, going on a pilgrimage, he sums

It all up in a joke, the name of the place Aarhus (our house)

- The Grauballe Man. Reference to beauty and atrocity, the aesthetic quality of
these bodies, rather uneasy confluence of beauty and atrocity, but in these bodies
they are balanced

- Bog Queen

- Punishment: an exploration of his own complicitness

- Casualty

- Moss Bound

12